Syndicating Content - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's hard to foresee a lot of benefit to your hard work creating content when you don't have much of a following, and even if you do, scaling that content creation is difficult for any marketer. One viable answer is syndication, and in this Whiteboard Friday, Eric Enge shows you both reasons why you might want to syndicate as well as tips on how to go about it.

Heads-up! We published a one-two punch of Whiteboard Friday videos from our friends at Stone Temple Consulting today. Check out "I See Content (Everywhere)" by Mark Traphagen, too!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Hi everybody. I'm Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday, and today we're going to be talking about syndicated content. I probably just smeared my picture, but in any case, you hear about syndicated content and the first thing that comes across your mind is, "Doesn't that create duplicate content, and isn't somebody going to outrank me for my own stuff?" And it is a legitimate concern. But before I talk about how to do it, I want to tell you about why to do it, because there are really, really good sound reasons for syndicating content.

Why (and how) should I syndicate my content?

So first of all, here is your site. You get to be the site in purple by the way, and then here is an authority site, which is the site in green. You have an article that you've written called, "All About Fruit," and you deliver that article to that authority site and they publish the same article, hence creating the duplicate content. So why would you consider doing this?

Well, the first reason is that by association with a higher authority site there is going to be some authority passed to you, both from a human perspective from people that see that your content is up there. They see that your authored content is on this authority site. That by itself is a great thing. When we do the right things, we're also going to get some link juice or SEO authority passed to you as well. So these are really good reasons by itself to do it.

But the other thing that happens is you get exposure to what I call OPA or Other People's Audiences, and that's a very helpful thing as well. These people, as I've mentioned before, they're going to see you here, and this crowd, some of this crowd is going to start to become your crowd. This is great stuff. But let's talk about how to do it. So here we go.

Three ways to contentedly syndicate content

#1 rel=canonical

There are three ways that you can do this that can make this work for you. The first is, here's your site again, here's the authority site. You get the authority site to implement a rel=canonical tag back to your page, the same page, the exact article page on your site. That tells Google and Bing that the real canonical version of the content is this one over here. The result of that is that all of the PageRank that accrues to this page on the authority site now gets passed over to you. So any links, all the links, in fact, that this page gets now gets passed through to you, and you get the PageRank from all that. This is great stuff. But that's just one of the solutions. It's actually the best one in my opinion.

#2 meta noindex

The second best one down here, okay, same scenario -- your site, the authority's site. The authority's site implements a meta no index tag on their page. That's an instruction to the search engine to not keep this page in the index, so that solves the duplicate content problem for you in a different way. This does as well, but this is a way of just taking it out of the index. Now any links from this page here over to your page still pass PageRank. So you still want to make sure you're getting those in the process. So a second great solution for this problem.

#3 Clean Link to Original Article

So these are both great, but it turns out that a lot of sites don't really like to do either of these two things. They actually want to be able to have the page in the index, or they don't want to take the trouble to do this extra coding. There is a third solution, which is not the best solution, but it's still very workable in the right scenarios. That is you get them to implement a clean text link from the copied page that they have on their site over to your site, to the same article on your site. The search engines are pretty good at understanding, when they see that link, that it means that you're the original author. So you're still getting a lot of authority passed, and you're probably eliminating a duplicate content problem.

So again, let's just recap briefly. The reason why you want to go through this trouble is you get authority from the authority site passed to you, both at a human level and at an SEO level, and you can gain audience from the audience of that authority site.

This is fantastic WBF and give me answer to few questions! But i have interesting question about syndication.

I live in country where english isn't official language and there is lot of information in our official language. What about i get content, translate it in English using humans and publish to some news like site with syndicated news. Of course original article will be linked in content with attributions.

Since information is being translated and didn't exist in internet should i being worried about something?

Peter, nowadays Google very well analyze texts, even when it's translated. But in your case I will NOT be worried. Translate it, make it unique and publish it. When you use author's work and words - I think it's ok.

Peter, nowadays Google very well analyze texts, even when it's translated. But in your case I will NOT be worried. Translate it, make it unique and publish it. When you use author's work and words - I think it's ok.

Sometimes it may happen that we got the ideas from high authority sites and trying to use same idea in other blog by transforming it. so just worried, Is it necessary to give attribution to that article?

Hi Darshan - it really depends on how unique the idea is, or how much you copy the way they explain it.

For example, if someone writes an article on how to make french toast, there may not be that much that is unique about it. However, if they are the only person that ever suggested to use a particular ingredient in their french toast recipe, that's a totally unique concept, then you should provide attribution, or if you copy a paragraph or two pretty much directly, you should still provide attribution, even if the idea is not that unique.

Of course, you should never copy the entire article.

You might want to read this article on Fair Use: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html. This is a US government site on the laws as they apply in the US, but the general concept works for how you should think about this worldwide.

Great WBF! This is something that recently caught my eye on Inc.com. They syndicate some of their content from smaller blogs and canonicalize back to the original.

When I fired up a query in search, though the original article ranked #1, the Inc.com article ranked #2. So whereas there are definite advantages for the smaller site, the larger site benefits as well. After all, when searching for a query and you recognize Inc.com as the second result and don't recognize the first blog, who are you going to click on? Inc.com!

The question is how come both are ranking, even though the Inc article canonicalizes back to the original? Is this normal?

There are other factors in the ranking equation. Google may still decide that it will rank the site carrying the syndicated article, because it believes the user will be more satisfied by that. You can view that as a downside, but I don't.

First of all if someone searches on the article title, they already know about it, and that's a good thing. And, you still get exposure to their audience.

Another good way to do #3 here is to only syndicate part of your content & put an anchor at the end of the partial with "view full article on domain(dot)com". Lots of the news outlets choose to do it this way (along with a good portion of SEO email newsletters).

While I 100% agree about the best case scenario being a cross-domain canonical pointing to your site, as you said, that's rarely been the outcome in my experiences (authority site has their preferences too, ha).

I do have a question about the 3rd option: a text link pointing back to "your" piece of content on "your" domain.

What if the link is not to the same post on your site but just to the homepage?

At that point would you recommend trying to differentiate the content on your site enough to avoid duplicate concerns? Or would you simply reference somewhere in the piece on your site, "this content is also posted at…" ?

In your opinion, how close is that to reciprocal linking (paid or not)?

Sorry for the "rapid fire" questions, just thinking of a few different situations I've seen in the past. Overall, this is a really simple and effective recap of how to syndicate content, Eric. Nice work.

In one previous experience I was pulling from, the authority site was willing to link back but only with the homepage - not the specific page where the same content was. Hence, where the question originated.

I agree, the homepage was not my first choice. :) Thanks for the response.

There definitely can be issues if none of those 3 are used. The site publishing your content may outrank you, and you could be even seen as copying their content, rather than the other way around. I'd avoid it!

It is not easy to get a calnonical tag from the authority site, at least most of the sites accepting a submission of content do not have such considerate features for writers. At most, they only indicate the source site of content! Matt Cutts suggests us to share our own post on social sites like Facebook or Twitter, this will help Google judge that our site is the real writer, at least the one who has the same content at the earliest time point!

I have been doing this on a number of authority sites and have seen great benefits. I think the main obstacle is getting people to step away from the idea that every link needs to pass authority directly to the site. If the content is good and interesting, it will drive referral traffic.

Great video! I have an idea/question which could be solution number 4.

Seeing how most Syndicated content is taken from RSS feeds, would linking to your on article in your article help reduce duplicate content and ranking problems. For example, I publish an article about fruit and then take the URL from that article and add it to the article. I link to it using a keyword in the first two paragraphs. That way, when syndicated sites pick up the article you already have an embedded link within and don't have to worry about coding or rel=canonical.

On a side note. I have had problems with larger sites in the past outranking my own content in search results. It was frustrating as we did all the work and they got all the traffic. I ended up chopping my RSS feed into brief preview mode, but that got us booted out of one site and created a no ranking effect from the other.

Hi Mike - putting something in the article, or in the RSS feed is certainly a good idea, but some sites, they may just take it out. As you will see earlier in the comments, I don't recommend that most sites syndicate lots of content, but just take occasional pieces.

And as an author, you should only syndicate if it leads to an authority boost for you. The reality is that the other party may outrank you, no matter what you do, but implementing one of these solutions makes sure you still get SEO benefits from the exercise nonetheless.

Are these techniques used with sites like Feedburner? I've just started blogging and have read about setting up my site with Feedburner but want to make sure I'm doing it properly so I'm not giving my content away.

Hi Kyle - Feedburner should not be an issue. Your using Feedburner does not give anyone the right to publish your content. That still (should ) require your permission. Of course, people may steal it, but they could do that with or without Feedburner involved.

I used to try rel = canonical method often. I'm hoping to try out third one. i.e., implementing a text link. As you said, meta no index is the only way to take out from the index, not to stop the link to the page. Third one will work perfectly for sure. Thanks for sharing :)

Is there anything that a high authority site should do against syndicated content?

A large authority site that publishes 60% original content and 40% syndicated, like you said before, big sites dont like going out of their way and adding canonical or noindex tags into specific pages and they also want to benefit from the syndicated content.

Do you think that they can be subjected to panda penalties?

What would be the best compromise in between benefiting from syndicated content and optimizing the site against google penalties?

Hi Arie - great question. I'd say that 40% is on the high side for syndicating content, so the first thing I would do is to lower that percentage. That would be the best defense against Panda. If it's desired to try and rank for that 3rd party article, I'd go with option 3 - a clean link back.

I would avoid strategies like linking to the author's home page. I think it's just the wrong thing to do, and you should not be trying to build your business based on ranking for other people's content.

Short and precise. Thank you Eric for a great WBF! When syndicating content, it is not always easy to make sure that a authority site will make the recommended changes, so you get the full credit of the content.

I would always make sure that the site I am syndicating content to, is accepting the content on my terms and not getting all of the credit for my hard work

Great advice here but WHY would a high profile site want to publish your duplicate content and then send you all their authority? I write for a few industry sites and every one insists that the content is unique.

Hi Chris - great question! Relevance is a big deal. However, you want to take into account their relative authority. I would only syndicate to site that have higher authority than mine. I want to maximize the value of the links I get back, as well as the exposure to their OPA.

You can use the Domain Authority (DA) as one measure. If you are a 40 DA, and you can syndicate to someone with a 70 DA, that's great stuff!

@Chris. Well DA and PR are the best parameters while determining the authority of the site. You can use either one or both of them to determine whether you want to syndicate your site's content to a particular site or not.

Whew! I was sweating there for a minute. I had a article get picked up on a great site and turns out they went with method #3, which seems like the easiest. Eric, you say "it turns out that a lot of sites don't really like to do either of these two things" (meaning #1 or #2), so I have to ask everyone here, what percentage of the time will I just end up with getting a link back to the original article vs. the other two? Is it even worth asking for rel=canonical or or the meta noindex? I guess I'm looking for clarification on the "probably eliminating a duplicate content problem" statement. If that's a significant possibility, then I'm worried about it. Thoughts?

Hi Joey - I think #1 and #2 are sometimes hard to ask for, particularly if you are trying to get someone to take your content. However, if they come and ask you for it, then there is a better chance of getting one of those 2 types of implementations.

I spent the last 2 weeks on this topic trying to convince myself that all the Google penalty terrorism was too much. This clarifies pretty much everything people need to know about syndicating.

Companies spend energy and give their blood to write content. Why should they not spread it to the world????

This is great especially for a start-up or a medium size company which is expanding to new markets. No traffic to the site, no brand awareness, limited paid media budget. Syndicating can help you to receive the attention and traffic that you need. For sure this should not be the core of your strategy but certainly it can help to grow.

Pushing your content as much as you can is not a crime! Thanks again for expanding this topic!

Nice WBF Eric! Assuming that the target website(s) of your syndication strategy shot you down on all three options, perhaps a fourth option would simply be to place a self-referential rel canonical within the original article. Thoughts?

Hi Maximillian - well, I bet they would probably take that out if you did that. However, if the authority benefits of being on a given site are high enough, even without all 3 options, it might still be worth considering. But, I would do that only with extremely high authority sites.

Sometimes the visibility you get can provide a large enough benefit that you still want to do it anyway!